Franklin Templeton Launches Money Market Fund on Ethereum

After putting its flagship crypto product on a range of different blockchains, Wall Street giant Franklin Templeton has finally launched its fund on Ethereum proper. 

The asset manager on Thursday said that its Nasdaq-listed On-Chain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) is now available on the crypto network behind the second biggest digital coin, ETH.

FOBXX is a fund that lets customers put cash into U.S. government securities, cash, and repurchase agreements. It allows investors to buy shares and hold them in digital wallets via the Franklin Templeton’s Benji Investments mobile app.

The fund is available on a number of blockchains, including Avalanche, Stellar, and Aptos, as well as Ethereum scaling networks Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base—but Ethereum is by far the biggest and well-known of all the networks, and this is the first time that Franklin Templeton has deployed on its mainnet.

Ethereum is a blockchain that allows users to build decentralized apps (dapps). Its native coin, ETH, became available for traditional investors earlier this year when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a number of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track the price of the coin. 

Franklin Templeton said that FOBXX is the first and only U.S.-registered fund to use a public blockchain as the system of record to process transactions and record share ownership.

Edited by Andrew Hayward